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Monthly Digest May, 2014

May 01, 2014

This Month's Top Stories and Announcements

Meet Mark Showalter Showalter is the discoverer of six moons and three planetary rings. He is a Senior Research Scientist at the SETI Institute, the PI of NASA's Planetary Data System Rings Node, a co-investigator on the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn, and co-investigator on the New Horizons mission to Pluto.

Kepler 186f: Is It Inhabited?It's so far away that even if you booked a trip on the speediest of our rockets, you'd have 100 million years to polish your Sudoku skills en route to Kepler 186f.

Seth Shostak at Starlight FestivalSeth Shostak, Senior Astronomer at SETI Institute will give a special presentation “Finding ET: The Search Today” at the StarLight Festival on May 24th in Big Bear, CA to answer these questions and to give us insight into the serious, scientific inquiry of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Silicon Valley Lecture Series

On Wednesday, May 21st, 2014, at 7 pm, Dr. Chung-Pei Ma (of the University of California, Berkeley) will give a free, illustrated, non-technical talk on:

Monster Black Holes: What Lurks at the Center of Galaxies

The talk is part of the Silicon Valley Astronomy Lecture Series, now in its 14th year.

Black holes are among the most fascinating objects in the cosmos and have long entranced the public as well as astronomers. Today we understand that black holes can grow to monstrous size, swallowing the mass of millions or billions of suns. New telescopes and techniques in the past decade have expanded and improved our ability to weigh such “supermassive black holes.” Dr. Ma will describe recent discoveries of record-breaking black holes, each with a mass of ten billion times the mass of the Sun. New evidence shows that these objects could be the dormant remnants of powerful “quasars” that existed in the young universe.

Chung-Pei Ma is Professor of Astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include the origin and large-scale structure of the universe, the formation and development of galaxies, and the growth of giant black holes. She is also an avid violin player and pursued parallel studies in physics and music at MIT and the New England Conservatory of Music.

Support the Quest

Please make a year-end donation today to support the exploration of life beyond Earth and help bring this quest to the widest possible audience. The SETI Institute Trustees will match all donations up to $50,000 received by December 31. Your gift is tax-deductible in the US and will fund critical work in education, public outreach, and SETI searches.